E6540 Owners Thread

Drilled holes in my spare cover tonight.. Doing some testing, I'll update tomorrow!

 

Excellent, keep us updated.

Today I recieved my Belkin laptop cooling stand (Belkin Cooling Stand for Laptops up to 17-inch - Black: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories a quick Civ V game this morning revealed that temps have dropped approx. 10*C with the fan on (90*C to 80*C), directly beneath the vent. A pretty good result so far, considering this is with the stock thermal paste as well.

 

scrlk,

Is this reduction in temp. with the "Belkin Cooling Stand" alone or did you also drill holes in the bottom of the case ?

 

No holes drilled yet, that might be a future path for me.

 

It's not perfect, my guide slipped a bit while I was drilling but this is what I'm working with

 

they look really good, ive done this sort of thing before and i know its nearly impossible to line up perfectly..

i think the holes are a little on the big side, make sure you clean the fan with compressed air a little more frequently, as more dust will be sucked in from those holes.

but at least your throttling days are over... keep us posted with the temps

 

Looks pretty good. :thumbsup:

Might want to put some fine mesh over it to act as a fan filter though, could get rather dusty as madoon said.

 

I'd second the mesh. I guess we could always find someone with access to a 3d scanner and a milling machine and make a new bottom cover with holes out of aluminum or something. Wishful thinking and all.

 

Still workin out the kinks.. I will say that there didn't seem to be a significant change until I isolated the fan to pull just from the drilled holes though. Just trying to make sure I'm not choking the fan so I'm gonna drill a few more holes to be safe.

Edit: This machine won't run two consistent tests in a row to save it's life.. One set runs fine, another one GPU usage fluctuates randomly. One set shows the CPU throttling, next set doesn't at the same temperatures. I don't get it. All the conditions are exactly the same, I'm allowing adequate time for the machine to cool down in between... Reboot? Maybe I have to reboot between each run..? What a pain..

Edit2: yup, reboot required. I had planned to run three 15min tests of each scenario, but I'm gonna just run one 15min of each for now to get some results up. Then you guys can compare to your machines if you want.

 

I clean my notebooks every other day on average so I think I'm covered.. I originally hadn't exposed the fan completely so I went back and added some more holes to make sure the fan had adequate air to draw. Below you'll find a pic of the altered vent holes. I simply made loops of painters tape and placed them around the fan to isolate it. Not very fancy or pretty, but it worked great for testing. Also note that I used an extra bottom cover to modify so I can go back to stock it needed. There's no going back once you drill your only cover!

Spoiler

The tests I performed ran for ~15 minutes each and included Prime95 (In-place Large FTTs, minimized) and Kombustor (also verifies run time) to max the CPU and GPU. I monitored using ThrottleStop and Argus Monitor. The battery was removed for all tests and the laptop was on a flat/hard surface unless noted. My current paste is MX-4.

Sorry for the small pics, larger versions attached at bottom. Here we go!

Stock Cover

Run 1:

Spoiler

Drilled Cover

Run 1:

Spoiler

@ 25 Minutes:

Spoiler

@ 35 Minutes, raised back for last 10:

Spoiler

No Cover

Run 1:

Spoiler

No Cover With Cooling Pad

Run 1:

Spoiler

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
These results aren't exactly real world usage, but they give an idea of where limits are. I plan to conduct more testing to graph results while playing games and I encourage others to do the same. While there was some improvement from the drilled holes, there wasn't a dramatic effect until I isolated the fan to make it only draw air from the drilled holes so I only provided those runs. This helped drop temps, but there are drawbacks to this. The fan is originally meant to pull air across other components (RAM, wifi card, etc), which is part of the reason there weren't holes made for it. While I didn't measure it, there was a noticeable increase in temperature at the front of the laptop near the track pad (ie RAM) after isolating the fan.

**I'm not responsible for any damage cause to your machine!!**
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Long story short, it definitely seems to help! The cooling system is inherently inadequate though. We all are experiencing heat issues which means it's not a fluke. Dell made/tested this machine and still decided that it was good enough for release. Sure, many laptops throttle at these temps. The problem is that these laptops hits these temps constantly. They idle high, I personally see 60-70C during light usage, and any attempt at gaming or professional applications brings the system to it knees. We need to provide Dell with proof that these machines were flawed from the beginning so they can do something to fix this. That means documenting your real world usage (gaming, CAD, etc) here and then filing a complaint about your notebook with Dell. Describe the issue, describe your usage, and link them to this thread if you're so inclined. I tweeted this page to @DellCares (Dell's Twitter support group).

https://twitter.com/DellCares
https://www.facebook.com/DellBusiness


Programs I Used:
MSI Afterburner 3.0.0 Beta 18 Has Kombustor built in
Prime95 27.7
ThrottleStop 6.00
Argus Monitor 2.5.08 Free 30-Day Trial